Biology Lessons

by Melissa Kantor

Genres: YA Coming of Age; YA Contemporary

Synopsis

Biology Lessons is a heartfelt and profound contemporary young adult novel about the strength and importance of female friendship in a time when bodily autonomy is outlawed, from acclaimed author Melissa Kantor.

Grace Williams has her future all mapped out. A high school senior in her beloved state of Texas, Grace plans to move to New York after graduation to study at Barnard College, and maybe, someday, win a Nobel Prize in biology. When she's asked to tutor Jack Nelson, the star baseball player who's flunking bio, she thinks it'll be just another activity to list on her college application. Studying turns to flirting, flirting becomes secret hook ups, and despite her expertise in bio, Grace gets pregnant. In a state where abortion is illegal, with parents who would expect her to keep the baby, Grace’s future is over before it’s begun.

With no one else to turn to, Grace must rely on her best friends, Addie and Sebastian, but anti-abortion laws put anyone who helps Grace in grave danger, and anyone they encounter might be an informant. When Grace finds a phone number and an offer of help scrawled in a bathroom stall, the three friends hatch a plan to sneak Grace across state lines. The risks to people she loves and those who have befriended her terrify Grace, but with Addie and Sebastian by her side, at least she isn't alone.

A love letter to hometowns, New York, and infinite possibilities, Biology Lessons showcases the transformative power of friendship in a world where choice is something you have to fight for.

Release date: January 14, 2025

Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

Print pages: 256

Sample

DAY 28

I knew Jack was going to break up with me when he texted, Can we talk? Can we talk? is basically the worst thing you can say to someone, because it’s a combination of I’m about to punch you in the face and I pity you, because you are about to be punched in the face.

I wished I was cool enough to text back something like, IDK, can we? But I’m not. I’m not a very cool person. In fact, the only really cool thing that has ever happened to me—not the only good thing, but the only cool thing—is that Jack Nelson liked me for a little while.

So I just texted back K. Then he replied that he would call me in a few.

I paced around my room, pulling at the neck of my Barnard T-shirt, waiting for him to call. I felt like I needed to puke, which I figured was probably because Jack was about to break up with me. To get my mind off my stomach, I looked at the framed cover of The New Yorker that used to hang in my great-aunt Wendy’s Manhattan apartment and now hangs on the wall in my room. It shows a smiling woman riding her bicycle along a cobblestoned street in New York City. I don’t really like to bike, but I stared at it, thinking, New York City New York City New York City, picturing myself sitting inside the café the woman was biking past.

I’ve lived in Buele, Texas, my whole life, but I’ve loved New York City since I first saw it. It’s why I’m going to college there in September. Every summer since sixth grade, I’ve visited New York to stay with Great-Aunt Wendy, really my father’s aunt, the only person in my family who doesn’t live in Texas. Wendy said she felt like a fish out of water when she was growing up in Kaplan, Texas, in the twentieth century, which is exactly how I feel growing up in Buele in the twenty-first. Don’t get me wrong: I’m fully team You Better Not Mess with Texas. If you have something bad to say about my home state, you’ve clearly never eaten Texas barbecue or experienced Southern hospitality or seen the stars glittering in the velvet sky over Big Bend. The Texas flag flies proudly over my bed.

But I was born to live in New York City.

My parents and two older brothers cannot understand why I love New York so much. The one time we visited as a family I was eleven. We went for Aunt Wendy’s seventieth birthday, and my family kept complaining about how noisy and dirty the city was. The party was at a French restaurant in Greenwich Village, and during cocktail hour in the garden, one of the guests pointed at my brother Liam’s tie, which had a Texas flag on it, and she said—with true disgust—“How can you wear that?” Liam and I were totally confused until we realized she had confused the Texas flag with the Confederate flag. We thought it was hilarious, but when we told my dad, he was furious. “The ignorance!” he kept saying. “The absolute ignorance of these so-called educated people!” The whole flight back, my parents, Liam, and my oldest brother, Grant, talked about how glad they were that they never had to step foot in deplorable New York ever again. It was like we’d been in different places, because on that same trip, I fell in love with the city. We took the subway, where musicians played on the platforms and in the cars. Or we were out on the street walking, and when we turned a corner, Manhattan would be a different place, peaceful with trees and houses or bustling with a street fair. New York was everything everywhere all at once—on a single block, I was able to buy a vintage dress, a book for Addie, a falafel, and a boba. How could I not fall in love with it? And how could I not fall in love with the woman who introduced me to it, my great-aunt Wendy, whom I’d only met once before. She had come to Buele for my grandma’s funeral when I was too young to really appreciate her.

Wendy died eight months ago. She had been diagnosed with cancer last spring, and it was so far along when they found it that she couldn’t even get treatment—they just gave her something called palliative care, keeping her as comfortable as possible. She didn’t have any children—she always said I was her daughter and granddaughter all rolled into one. In her will, she left me a college fund, which is why I can afford to go to Barnard in Manhattan in September. It’s a women’s college my parents would never in a million years pay for even if they had that kind of money—my mom and dad are convinced a person’s happiness and their distance from their hometown are inversely proportional. Wendy, though, knew that wasn’t true. Wendy knew that just living in New York gets you halfway to happiness, and even though it felt so lonely to imagine being there without her, I knew that once I got there, New York would help me figure everything out.

Who cares about Jack Nelson breaking up with me? I asked myself. I’m going to live a fabulous big-city life. Unfortunately, college was still six months (i.e., a lifetime) away.

* * *

Jack still hadn’t called. Outside it was pouring. Cold and rainy is typical for Buele in March, and usually I love when a storm races through my neighborhood and the branches of the massive oaks blow like crazy and day turns to night in a matter of minutes. But today the storm’s darkness seemed threatening, like this rainy day existed to illustrate how dark and cold my life was about to become. I needed to talk to my best friend, Addie. Addie and our friend Sebastian, who lives in Austin, were the only people who knew about me and Jack. But of the two of them, Addie was the one who would have the magic formula to make me laugh hard enough to dissolve the knot that had formed in my stomach as I read Jack’s text. I scrolled to her name, but it was too late—my phone rang. Jack. I’d been waiting for his call, but the noise still startled me, and I dropped the phone. I sat on the floor and put the soles of my feet together. “Inhale, exhale,” I whispered. I was wearing yoga pants and playing the role of my own yoga instructor. Inhale, no big deal. Exhale, no big deal. By the time I picked up the phone, it had rung four times.

“Hey,” I said, relieved my voice was calm.

“Oh,” he said. Jack was the one who sounded startled, like, even though he had texted me and said he was going to call and I’d said okay and then he’d dialed my number and I’d picked up the phone, somehow he had no idea how any of this had happened. “Hey.”

Pause.

“How’s it going?” I asked. Then I cursed myself silently for asking when I was just postponing the inevitable.

“Okay. Okay,” he said.

“Good, good,” I said, because apparently we were now saying everything twice.

“So,” he said.

“So,” I said. I couldn’t completely hide my nervousness, and my voice was breathy. I tried to inhale slowly through my nose and exhale through my mouth, hoping it didn’t make me sound like Darth Vader.

“I kind of think … maybe…” He didn’t finish his sentence. He does that a lot, starts saying something and then doesn’t finish it. That was how he first kissed me. He said, “Grace, you’re so…” and then he kissed me. “The thing is…” he went on now, not finishing the first sentence so much as starting a new one.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think it’s kind of … over.” I said the words without deciding to say them, but as soon as they were out of my mouth, I was relieved. My saying them made it seem as if I was the one who wanted to break up with Jack. Even though we weren’t exactly breaking up since we hadn’t exactly been going out.

“You’re so awesome, Grace,” he said. I could hear the smile in his voice. “I totally loved hanging out with you.”

Was that what he was calling it? Hanging out? I was feeling really sick, like I was seriously about to vomit, so I was glad my voice came out normal. “Oh, yeah. You, too, Jack.”

“Well.” Pause. “I guess I’ll see you around school.”

“Yeah,” I managed to say. “See you around.”

He hung up. Or maybe I did. I sat there, nauseated, looking at my feet. I desperately needed to talk to Addie so she could explain why I was feeling so sick, why everything felt so empty and pointless. Being with Jack was supposed to be this totally chill thing. Why was its ending suddenly feeling extremely not chill? Addie’s phone went right to voicemail, which meant she was driving. She’s a super- cautious driver, and she won’t even have her phone where she can see it if she’s behind the wheel.

It’s over with Jack, I typed. Call me!!!!!!

Then I went to the bathroom and threw up.



DAY -140

It was actually less surprising that Jack Nelson broke up with me than that we got together in the first place. I guess you’d say we ran in different circles: Even though we were both seniors, we barely knew each other. Or, I should say, I knew who Jack was, but Jack didn’t know who I was. He’s on the baseball team. Baseball isn’t as big at Eastlake as football, but being a good first baseman, which Jack is, means people know you. I’m the co-chair of the Green Team. Let’s just say that if Eastlake were rock-paper-scissors, baseball beats environmentalism. The only reason we talked to each other in the first place was because I’m a peer tutor, and Jack needed help with bio.

I was a little disappointed that I’d be working with Jack, who seemed like the cliché of a rich, dense jock. I’d wanted to make a difference with a capital D when I volunteered to peer tutor: I’d work with a girl who didn’t think she was into science until—abracadabra!—I introduced her to Mendelian genetics and, Hello, future Nobel-winning biologist! Instead, I got Jack Nelson, who I figured couldn’t have cared less about biology and just needed to maintain a C average to stay on the baseball team.

We had our first meeting in September. Sofiya, Hazel, Addie, and I had gone to Monster’s Deli right after school—Sofiya and Hazel were obsessed with getting Gatorade before soccer practice—and Addie and I had come along for the ride. Sofiya must have asked me twenty times if I could work the conversation with Jack around to finding out if his teammate Julian Lewis thought she was pretty, and Hazel kept going, “She’s tutoring him in biology, Sofiya, not chemistry.” Then everyone would crack up. But I couldn’t get in the right spirit. I was worried about a project I was working on with the middle school for the Green Team, and I’d had Wendy’s memorial service the previous weekend. I was stressed and sad and not exactly in the mood to tutor Jack, not even if it would get Sofiya a date with Julian. The only things that had made me smile all day were the kitten videos Sebastian sent hourly in an attempt to cheer me up.

There’d been a mile-long line at the deli, so I was a few minutes late to meet Jack. We’d agreed to meet in the library, and I went over to where he was sitting at a long table by the windows. As soon as he saw me, he stood up and said, “Hi, Grace. I’m Jack.” Then he shook my hand in this formal way that was polite, I guess, but also kind of awkward, because we were two teenagers shaking hands. He must have been at least six feet tall. I’m on the short side—maybe five feet three when I first wake up (it’s a biological fact that people get shorter over the course of the day). We were standing close enough that I had to tilt my head slightly to see his face.

That first session, Jack kept saying how smart I was and thanking me and apologizing for how slow he was, and I kept being like, “It’s fine. You’re doing great.” He wasn’t exactly doing great. Like, at one point, I was trying to explain why his answer to a problem he’d done for homework was wrong.

“It’s because if IV fluids were distilled water, they would be hypotonic compared to the contents inside blood cells, and that would result in a net flow of water into cells by osmosis. The cells would just—I mean, they’d burst. That’s why it’s saline. Saline is isotonic to blood cells.” I looked up from the page. His eyes were very dark brown, and I could see my reflection in them.

Jack laughed. “You lost me somewhere around ‘hypotonic.’”

I laughed, too. It was hard not to laugh when Jack laughed, and I admired how he didn’t try to pretend he understood something when he didn’t, which is something I sometimes do.

At the end of the hour, I stood up. In August, I had convinced the rest of the Green Team that we should visit the middle school once a month to lead conversations around environmental activism. We hadn’t been sure if any middle school kids would be interested, but twenty kids had shown up to the first meeting. Now we had a bunch of junior activists and no curriculum planned. It was time to get serious, and I had a meeting with the rest of the team starting in a few minutes.

“Well, I hope that was helpful,” I said.

“It really was, Grace,” he said, still sitting at the table. “You’re so patient. I appreciate that.” Then he gave me this big smile. Jack’s got a solid smile. His teeth are very white, and his eyes crinkle at the corners. I guess what I’m saying is that Jack was all in on his smile, and in spite of myself, I smiled back at him. I also noticed how shiny his brown hair was and how his broad shoulders filled out his white T-shirt with the purple Eastlake Panthers crest on it. He stood up and went to shake my hand again.

“We don’t have to keep shaking hands,” I said.

“Right,” he said, and he blushed a little. “Sorry. I guess I’m a little nervous.”

“Seriously?” I couldn’t believe it. Why would Jack Nelson be nervous around me?

As if he’d heard my unanswered question, Jack said, “I just don’t want you to think I’m some dipshit jock. I really want to learn this stuff.”

“I wouldn’t think you’re a dipshit jock,” I said, feeling guilty for thinking he was a dipshit jock.

“Yeah, well…” He shrugged. “I guess I want to impress you.”

“Sure,” I said, swinging my car keys back and forth on their lanyard so they wrapped and then unwrapped around my hand. “Well, good luck with that.”



DAY -139

“Oh my god,” said Addie the next day when I told her what I’d said. “You are such a bitch.”

“I know!” I dropped my head into my hands. We were at Emily’s, our favorite coffee shop, which had opened on Main Street a few months earlier. I had an untouched latte in front of me. “I didn’t mean it like … mean.”

“Good luck with that,” Addie said in her most sarcastic voice.

“I didn’t say it like that!” I slapped her knee.

“Yeah? How’d you say it? Were you like, ‘Good luck with that.’” She made her voice super sexy and gave me a meaningful look.

“I hate you.”

“You love me.”

I leaned back on the purple velvet couch, took a sip of my latte, and tried to think of a way to spin things. “I just meant … you know, like ‘I’m sure you’ll be able to … like, impress me. Someday. When you learn science. Which probably won’t happen.’”

Addie nodded. “Yeah, that’s way better. I’m sure he appreciated that.” Addie has long brown hair that falls along the side of her cheeks in two perfect lines, as if her face is in parentheses. Now she swooped it off her neck and knotted it with a hair tie. The ends were purple, and they poked up over the top of her head, like a bird’s bright and beautiful plumage.

I put my latte down on the marble-topped table in front of us a little too forcefully, and some slopped over the edge of the mug. “You know what? I’m glad I said what I said. People are always falling all over themselves for Jack Nelson.” I stood up and started bowing. “‘Oh, Jack, you’re such a star!’ ‘Oh, Jack, you’re so cool!’ ‘Oh, Jack, go out with me! Sit next to me! Invite me to your party!’” I plopped back down next to Addie. “I just made it clear to him it takes more than a pretty face to impress me.”

“You showed him!”

“That’s for sure!”

“No kidding around.”

“No siree, Bob!”

We both cracked up. Once we started laughing, we couldn’t stop. That’s the way it is with Addie and me: We laugh all the time about everything, even random old-man expressions like No siree, Bob, which we got from Addie’s grandpa.

Our finding everything hilarious is ironic because apparently other people find me “too negative.” That’s what my “friends” in seventh grade told me when they staged an intervention. Literally: an intervention. Claire Wilson, Olive Brown, June Lee, and Anne Hernandez sat me down in Claire’s room, made a circle around me, like I was an alcoholic or someone with a gambling addiction, and then told me all the things that were wrong with me including my hair (“totally frizzy and ugly brown color”), my clothes (“way too baggy”), and my nails (“they’re not a nice shape, Grace!”). But the biggest thing wrong with me, Claire said—the thing that was the real problem they didn’t know if they could overcome—was that I was so negative.

“You don’t like fun stuff, and it’s getting the rest of us down.” Claire ran her manicured nails through her not frizzy hair and crossed her legs in their skinny jeans.

“Yeah,” agreed Olive. Olive and Claire were best friends. I had thought that I was also their best friend, but apparently, I was a problem they had to solve.

“You really have to change,” Anne concluded. “If you want to keep hanging out with us.”

I called Aunt Wendy. This was a few months after my first summer in New York, and already I saw her as someone who held the secrets to the universe. When I told her about the intervention, Wendy said my hair was fine and my clothes were fine, and then she promised me that when I got older and moved to New York, I’d meet interesting people. I’d meet “my” people. She made it sound like everyone whose friends tried to change them in middle school eventually moved to New York City.

That might have been the only time my mom and Wendy saw eye to eye, because my mom also said I should be friends only with people who appreciated me. Unsurprisingly, however, her solution to my problems did not involve moving to New York City someday. Instead, she kept talking about all of these imaginary kids at school I could be friends with if I would just get to know them and let them get to know me. But I was kind of fixated on Claire, Olive, June, and Anne, and I convinced her to take me to the mall, where I got new clothes, and to her salon, where they did some kind of treatment that made my hair straight. Then we got mother-daughter gel manicures. The next morning, I got dressed and looked in the mirror.

I’d always thought my eyes, which are big and brownish green, were my best feature. But the combination of my stick-straight, dark brown hair and clumpy mascara somehow made them seem weirdly huge, like the pasted-on googly eyes we used for art projects in elementary school. That—combined with the pleated skirt and cropped T-shirt I was wearing—made me look exactly like today was Halloween and I’d dressed as an anime character.

Big shocker: Even though I changed my hair, my clothes, and my attitude (pretending to get really excited about celebrity makeovers and TikToks), Claire, Anne, Olive, and June did not decide I was worthy of their friendship! They dumped my faux-anime ass, after which I spent my lunch periods in the Eastlake Junior High library reading novels about postapocalyptic worlds and getting a lot of pleasure from thinking about my former so-called friends dissolving in the acid rain of the future.

That was where I met Addie. Addie was more of a loner than a reject; she had moved to Buele in sixth grade and hadn’t settled into a friend group, so she’d never been kicked out of one like I had. She hung out in the library a lot, and one day she noticed what I was reading and said she’d read it and it was good.

“It’s, like, exactly how it’s really going to be when the world comes to an end.” Tucked under her arm was a book that must have been a thousand pages long. Her brown hair had blue streaks, and she was wearing a voluminous skirt and a striped long-sleeved T-shirt.

“I’m planning to fight global warming,” I told her. I was back in my baggy jeans, and my hair was slowly returning to normal. “When I become an environmental biologist.”

Addie shrugged. “I’m pretty pessimistic,” she said. “But I appreciate your putting in the effort.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I aim to please.”

* * *

Two days later, I saw her in the library again. I’d finished the book, and I went over to the armchair where she was reading and told her how much I’d loved it. We talked about a couple of scenes we’d both liked and about the main character, who was a total badass.

Then I asked, “Do you picture yourself surviving the apocalypse or, like, being one of the nameless dead?” This was the kind of question Claire and Olive would have pointed to as evidence of my negative worldview.

Addie didn’t seem to think my question was a problem. She bit her lip, considering. “It’s hard to imagine living my best life in a world without books or running water. I just really like both those things.”

“Exactly,” I said, nodding. “Can you be a hero without having to eat beans straight out of the can?”

“Aye, there’s the rub,” she agreed. (I didn’t know it then, but she was quoting Shakespeare, which might have had something to do with why she, like me, wasn’t exactly rolling in friends.)

At some point, we moved from hanging out at lunch in the library to hanging out at our houses after school, and then suddenly we were best friends. Somewhere in there, Addie showed me her poetry—that’s what she wants to be when she grows up, a poet. Even back then, she already planned to get into UT Austin, where there were all these famous writers she could study with. She said that no one in Buele cared about poetry. I told her I was also basically counting the days until I could move to New York, because New York City was my destiny.

Over the next couple of years, Addie and I collected a few other friends: Sofiya Richardson and Hazel Douglas, whom Addie got to know when she played soccer during the fall of eighth grade (an experience she chose never to repeat). And then we started hanging out with Sebastian, who was on the Green Team with me and who we’re still friends with even though he moved to Austin the summer after ninth grade. But even when we had people to hang out with and weren’t the losers we’d been when we’d met, it always came back to Addie and me—best friends. I guess you could say that with our desire to turn our backs on our hometown and our obsession with the apocalypse, we were both negative people. But in biology, a negative feedback loop is the major way an organism returns to homeostasis, and homeostasis is just a fancy word to describe when a thing is exactly how it needs to be.



DAY -112

A month after that first tutoring session, I showed up at the library to find Jack standing outside its doors. He was wearing a purple varsity letterman jacket and cargo shorts, and his hair looked damp, like he’d just showered, which confused me since it was football season, not baseball season. Maybe he had practice anyway? But wasn’t that the definition of the offseason—the season in which people who played that sport were … off? Or were they just off the playing of games and not the practicing of the sport? I made a mental note to ask Sebastian, who’s an expert in all things baseball.

“Hi,” I said. “Were you waiting for me?” The idea was weird. We’d always met at the table where we worked. I’d been late before, so I guess this wasn’t the first time Jack had to wait for me, but waiting for me at the table seemed normal, while waiting for me at the doors to the library felt like the shaking-hands thing all over again.

Jack tapped his pencil on the closed library door. The handwritten sign that I hadn’t noticed read, ON TUESDAY, WE WILL BE CLOSING THE LIBRARY AT 3:00 P.M. TO DO INVENTORY. SIGNED, YOUR FRIENDLY LIBRARIANS. There was a smiley face next to the word librarians.

“Well, that’s not very friendly,” I said.

“Student lounge?” Jack suggested.

“Sure,” I said. But when we got there, music was blasting and upperclassmen were playing keep-away with a freshman’s baseball cap.

“My house?”

I looked at him, startled, and he looked away. “Sorry,” he said. “It was just an idea. I live, like, five minutes from here.” He quickly added: “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“What? No. It’s fine.” To reassure him that he hadn’t freaked me out, I said, “Yeah. Your house. Great idea,” even though I wasn’t sure it was.

As I drove behind Jack’s car to Jack’s house and parked in Jack’s driveway, I tried to put my finger on why the whole thing felt super awkward. I think it was that I didn’t really think about Jack as living somewhere. Like, obviously I knew he had a house, but I had never thought about his life outside of Eastlake and off the baseball field, and now here we were, walking through his garage into his enormous kitchen, saying hi to his mom. Her hair was so blond, it was almost white, and she was wearing a pair of skinny jeans and a fancy blouse and heels even though she was chopping vegetables. She made a big fuss about me and how I was saving her son from a fate worse than death, i.e., failing to get a good score on the Biology AP test. Then she said Jack had told her I was a real science genius and she’d bring some snacks to the dining room table for us.


Copyright © 2025 by Melissa Kantor